Wikipedia and Diderot
In a moment of post-modern horror and giddy shock, I discovered yesterday that a friend of mine has a page in Wikipiedia, all about her. Indeed, Wikipedia seems to be everywhere now on the web. Almost every Google search returns some kind of Wikipedia page, and the project claims some 500,000 people have contributed material. There’s even a rather arcane set of neologisms that have cropped up in the set of people involved in the project, which I can’t pretend to understand- my favorite is “inclusionist” versus “deletionist”, which mirrors plant taxonomy’s “lumpers” and “splitters”.
It struck me this morning that this beautiful, quixotic project is a lot like the project of the French Encylopedists. The goal of their Encyclopedia was something larger than today’s encyclopedias: they wanted to contain all essential human knowledge about the arts and sciences, which was interpreted so broadly to mean just about everything. While the information was presented in a relatively objective fashion, the very concept of the Encyclopedia was a statement of Enlightment belief that knowledge and rationality would conquer most problems.
Maybe the creation of every new communication media breeds something like the French Encylopedists, for there’s a strong desire to systematize all the new content that multiples so rapidly. Wikipedia, like the French Encylopedists, both try to categorize knowledge into a logical hierarchy. And both efforts, while in theory “neutral,” imply a certain set of political beliefs, the belief that something like objective fact is possible. Ultimately, the French Encylopedists failed to categorize all knowledge, but they did breed a durable set of encyclopedias that served millions of students well. Similarly, Wikipedia is bound to fail, particularly as the subjects in some of its pages get even more arcane and contemporary, for the subject may change faster than the page can. Still, the Wikipedia has managed to make itself a largely decentralized system, and it is possible the set of pages created by these hundred of thousand of authors will persist over quite a long time. Oh, how Diderot would have been proud!
